I don't think it's deserved. If you don't need the kind of reactive queries Meteor offers (and IMO is still unbeaten in terms of developer productivity in case you do need them), then you can safely ignore that part. In the end Meteor is mainly a layer on top of nodejs. So you can do all your regular nodejs stuff and you can run Meteor without any of the mongo stuff these days. Then it still offers you a zero-config build tool which has been absolutely unbeaten (at least in the JS world) in terms of backwards compatibility over the years. I think Meteor mostly suffers from not being the cool new thing anymore and being released in a period of a heavily changing JS ecosystem. I'd still pick it over any webpack config-clusterfuck project any day of the week.